How to Use and Improve Your Abilities
1. Recognize your skills: You can have many types of skills and not even know it. Skills aren’t just knowledge, but are ways of relating to information and people. Skill types can include technical, transferable, and personal skills.[1] Technical skills are the “how-to’s”, such as fixing or creating things, and administering or following protocols, such as being a mechanic, nurse, artist, or racecar driver. Transferable skills are skills that can help in many situations, such as organization, customer service, teamwork, and leadership, and can be helpful across many professions or activities. Personal skills include being reliable, having initiative, listening to your gut/intuition, and being self-motivated
2. Reflect on what makes you happy: There’s no use using and improving skills you don’t enjoy. Even if you have skills you excel in, don’t waste your time doing things that you don’t find fun. Remember that money cannot buy happiness
3. Create goals: People who are goal-oriented tend to be happier and achieve more. Think about what you want to develop and what fuels you to want to improve these skills. When creating goals, make sure they are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, results-focused, and timely.
4. Pursue an education. A formal university education is well-respected by many and serves to give credibility in many fields. If you’d like to use and improve your skills in engineering, computers, foreign language, psychology, etc., obtaining formal education is a beneficial route to take, especially if you’d like to hold a job in one of these fields.
5. Make friends/network: Networking can be a beneficial business and personal skill. By having a network, you open yourself up to information, people, and power.[6] Find ways to meet other people in your field of interest, whether it be events, social media, or through friends of friends.
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